Genocide is one of the most pressing issues that confront us today. Its death toll is staggering: over one hundred million dead. Because of their intimate experience in the communities where genocide ...
More

Genocide is one of the most pressing issues that confront us today. Its death toll is staggering: over one hundred million dead. Because of their intimate experience in the communities where genocide takes place, anthropologists are uniquely positioned to explain how and why this mass annihilation occurs and the types of devastation genocide causes. This book explores a wide range of cases, including Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Bosnia.Less

Annihilating Difference : The Anthropology of Genocide

Published in print: 2002-08-15

Genocide is one of the most pressing issues that confront us today. Its death toll is staggering: over one hundred million dead. Because of their intimate experience in the communities where genocide takes place, anthropologists are uniquely positioned to explain how and why this mass annihilation occurs and the types of devastation genocide causes. This book explores a wide range of cases, including Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Bosnia.

The Art of Connection narrates the individual stories of artisans and traders of Kenyan arts and crafts as they struggled to overcome the loss of physical access to roadside market space by turning ...
More

The Art of Connection narrates the individual stories of artisans and traders of Kenyan arts and crafts as they struggled to overcome the loss of physical access to roadside market space by turning to new digital technologies to make their businesses more mobile and integrated into the global economy. The book illuminates the lived experiences of marginalized Kenyan businesspeople struggling in the shadow of the country’s international tourism to balance new risks with new types of mobility. These new strategies are balanced against older models of development based on the co-operative industry and ethnic networks. But for many young traders, such models appear outdated and lacking innovation. An array of ethnic and generational politics have led to market burnings and witchcraft accusations as Kenya’s crafts industry struggles to adapt to its new connection to the global economy. To mediate the resulting crisis of trust, the Fair Trade sticker and other NGO aesthetics continue to successfully represent a transparent, ethical, and trusting relationship between buyer and producer. By balancing revelation and obfuscation—what is revealed and what is not—Kenyan art traders can thus make their own roles as intermediaries and the exploitative realities of the global economy invisible. The art of connection is, therefore, a set of strategies for making and maintaining connections by deploying notions of transparency. But as the book illustrates, it is also an artistic motif that represents the importance of ideals of transparency and connections in the world today.Less

Art of Connection : Risk, Mobility, and the Crafting of Transparency in Coastal Kenya

Dillon Mahoney

Published in print: 2017-01-17

The Art of Connection narrates the individual stories of artisans and traders of Kenyan arts and crafts as they struggled to overcome the loss of physical access to roadside market space by turning to new digital technologies to make their businesses more mobile and integrated into the global economy. The book illuminates the lived experiences of marginalized Kenyan businesspeople struggling in the shadow of the country’s international tourism to balance new risks with new types of mobility. These new strategies are balanced against older models of development based on the co-operative industry and ethnic networks. But for many young traders, such models appear outdated and lacking innovation. An array of ethnic and generational politics have led to market burnings and witchcraft accusations as Kenya’s crafts industry struggles to adapt to its new connection to the global economy. To mediate the resulting crisis of trust, the Fair Trade sticker and other NGO aesthetics continue to successfully represent a transparent, ethical, and trusting relationship between buyer and producer. By balancing revelation and obfuscation—what is revealed and what is not—Kenyan art traders can thus make their own roles as intermediaries and the exploitative realities of the global economy invisible. The art of connection is, therefore, a set of strategies for making and maintaining connections by deploying notions of transparency. But as the book illustrates, it is also an artistic motif that represents the importance of ideals of transparency and connections in the world today.

This book investigates the cultural meaning system and resulting sensorium of Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana. It was discovered that the five-senses model has little relevance in Anlo ...
More

This book investigates the cultural meaning system and resulting sensorium of Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana. It was discovered that the five-senses model has little relevance in Anlo culture, where balance is a sense, and balancing (in a physical and psychological sense as well as in literal and metaphorical ways) is an essential component of what it means to be human. Much of perception falls into an Anlo category of seselelame (literally feel-feel-at-flesh-inside), in which what might be considered sensory input, including the Western sixth-sense notion of “intuition,” comes from bodily feeling and the interior milieu. The kind of mind–body dichotomy that pervades Western European–Anglo-American cultural traditions and philosophical thought is absent. The book relates how Anlo society privileges and elaborates what we would call kinesthesia, which most Americans would not even identify as a sense.Less

Culture and the Senses : Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community

Kathryn Linn Geurts

Published in print: 2003-01-09

This book investigates the cultural meaning system and resulting sensorium of Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana. It was discovered that the five-senses model has little relevance in Anlo culture, where balance is a sense, and balancing (in a physical and psychological sense as well as in literal and metaphorical ways) is an essential component of what it means to be human. Much of perception falls into an Anlo category of seselelame (literally feel-feel-at-flesh-inside), in which what might be considered sensory input, including the Western sixth-sense notion of “intuition,” comes from bodily feeling and the interior milieu. The kind of mind–body dichotomy that pervades Western European–Anglo-American cultural traditions and philosophical thought is absent. The book relates how Anlo society privileges and elaborates what we would call kinesthesia, which most Americans would not even identify as a sense.

This book chronicles the lives of a group of fishermen from Ghana who took the long and dangerous journey to Southern Italy in search of work in a cutthroat underground economy. A story that ...
More

This book chronicles the lives of a group of fishermen from Ghana who took the long and dangerous journey to Southern Italy in search of work in a cutthroat underground economy. A story that illuminates the nature of high-risk migration around the world, the book reveals the challenges and experiences of these international migrants who, like countless others, are often in the news but are rarely understood. The book tells how these men live on the fringes of society in Naples, what the often deadly journey across the Sahara Desert and Mediterranean Sea involved, and what their lives in the fishing village of Senya Beraku—where there are no more fish—were like. Asking how these men find meaning in their experiences, the author addresses broader existential questions surrounding the lives of economic refugees and their death-defying struggle for a life worth living. The book considers the ramifications of the many deaths that occur in the desert and the sea for those who are left behind.Less

Darkness before Daybreak : African Migrants Living on the Margins in Southern Italy Today

Hans Lucht

Published in print: 2011-12-26

This book chronicles the lives of a group of fishermen from Ghana who took the long and dangerous journey to Southern Italy in search of work in a cutthroat underground economy. A story that illuminates the nature of high-risk migration around the world, the book reveals the challenges and experiences of these international migrants who, like countless others, are often in the news but are rarely understood. The book tells how these men live on the fringes of society in Naples, what the often deadly journey across the Sahara Desert and Mediterranean Sea involved, and what their lives in the fishing village of Senya Beraku—where there are no more fish—were like. Asking how these men find meaning in their experiences, the author addresses broader existential questions surrounding the lives of economic refugees and their death-defying struggle for a life worth living. The book considers the ramifications of the many deaths that occur in the desert and the sea for those who are left behind.

This book explores how the values that underpin Western liberal democracy are contested and resisted in contemporary South Africa. During the 1980s, migrant workers from rural Zululand attempted to ...
More

This book explores how the values that underpin Western liberal democracy are contested and resisted in contemporary South Africa. During the 1980s, migrant workers from rural Zululand attempted to sabotage the revolution that was being led by the urban-based African National Congress (ANC), igniting a civil war that claimed thousands of lives. While the violence of that period has largely subsided, migrants continue to express discontent with the ANC government, which they articulate as a critique of liberal democracy itself. Migrants claim that democracy undermines the moral order that is crucial to good fortune and social reproduction in their rural homesteads—a fear that has heightened as neoliberalism renders family livelihoods ever more precarious. This antiliberal stance must be understood in the context of colonial governance in KwaZulu-Natal, which manipulated social differences between urban and rural areas. These differences continue to inform popular politics in the region today, particularly for migrant workers, who link their critique of democracy to a disapproval of the social forms that characterize contemporary urbanism. This study provides grist for a number of broader theoretical discussions. By paying attention to subaltern perspectives on democratization, it compels us to question common assumptions about the nature of liberal freedom and the forms of personhood that it seeks to produce. It also pushes us to rethink the social-scientific theories that seek to explain antiliberal politics, which rely on the very same assumptions that underpin the project of liberal democracy itself.Less

Democracy as Death : The Moral Order of Anti-Liberal Politics in South Africa

Jason Hickel

Published in print: 2015-02-25

This book explores how the values that underpin Western liberal democracy are contested and resisted in contemporary South Africa. During the 1980s, migrant workers from rural Zululand attempted to sabotage the revolution that was being led by the urban-based African National Congress (ANC), igniting a civil war that claimed thousands of lives. While the violence of that period has largely subsided, migrants continue to express discontent with the ANC government, which they articulate as a critique of liberal democracy itself. Migrants claim that democracy undermines the moral order that is crucial to good fortune and social reproduction in their rural homesteads—a fear that has heightened as neoliberalism renders family livelihoods ever more precarious. This antiliberal stance must be understood in the context of colonial governance in KwaZulu-Natal, which manipulated social differences between urban and rural areas. These differences continue to inform popular politics in the region today, particularly for migrant workers, who link their critique of democracy to a disapproval of the social forms that characterize contemporary urbanism. This study provides grist for a number of broader theoretical discussions. By paying attention to subaltern perspectives on democratization, it compels us to question common assumptions about the nature of liberal freedom and the forms of personhood that it seeks to produce. It also pushes us to rethink the social-scientific theories that seek to explain antiliberal politics, which rely on the very same assumptions that underpin the project of liberal democracy itself.

Utilizing narratives of seven different people—soldier, rebel, student, trader, evangelist, father, and politician—I Did It To Save My Life provides fresh insight into how ordinary Sierra Leoneans ...
More

Utilizing narratives of seven different people—soldier, rebel, student, trader, evangelist, father, and politician—I Did It To Save My Life provides fresh insight into how ordinary Sierra Leoneans survived the decade-long war that devastated their country. The book illuminates a social world based on love, a deep, compassionate relationship of material exchange that transcends romance and binds people together across space and through time. Individuals in the town of Makeni narrate survival through the rubric of love, and by telling their stories and bringing memory into the present, they create for themselves a powerful basis on which to reaffirm the rightness of their choices and to orient themselves to a livable everyday existence. In situating their wartime lives firmly in this social world, they call into question the government’s own narrative that Makeni residents openly collaborated with the RUF (Revolutionary United Front) during its three-year occupation of the town. Residents argue instead that it was the government’s disloyalty to its people, rather than the rebel invasion and occupation, that destroyed the town and forced the uneasy coexistence between civilians and rebels.Less

I Did It to Save My Life : Love and Survival in Sierra Leone

Catherine E. Bolten

Published in print: 2012-10-01

Utilizing narratives of seven different people—soldier, rebel, student, trader, evangelist, father, and politician—I Did It To Save My Life provides fresh insight into how ordinary Sierra Leoneans survived the decade-long war that devastated their country. The book illuminates a social world based on love, a deep, compassionate relationship of material exchange that transcends romance and binds people together across space and through time. Individuals in the town of Makeni narrate survival through the rubric of love, and by telling their stories and bringing memory into the present, they create for themselves a powerful basis on which to reaffirm the rightness of their choices and to orient themselves to a livable everyday existence. In situating their wartime lives firmly in this social world, they call into question the government’s own narrative that Makeni residents openly collaborated with the RUF (Revolutionary United Front) during its three-year occupation of the town. Residents argue instead that it was the government’s disloyalty to its people, rather than the rebel invasion and occupation, that destroyed the town and forced the uneasy coexistence between civilians and rebels.

One of the most disturbing spectacles of recent decades has been brutal acts of violence—indeed genocide—between groups who had long lived together in relative peace. In such cases lethal violence is ...
More

One of the most disturbing spectacles of recent decades has been brutal acts of violence—indeed genocide—between groups who had long lived together in relative peace. In such cases lethal violence is the product not of some far away and unseen hand but rather the hand of your neighbor, someone who before some unforeseen event was perhaps even your friend. Employing multi-sited and multi-vocal ethnography, the book examines how peaceful neighbors become transformed into perpetrators and victims of lethal violence. It engages with a set of interlocking Kenyan case studies, focusing on sometimes-peaceful, sometimes violent interactions between Samburu herders and neighboring groups, interweaving Samburu narratives of key violent events with the narratives of neighboring groups on the other side of the same encounters. The book is, on one hand, an ethnography of particular people in a particular place, vividly portraying the complex and confusing dynamics of interethnic violence principally through the lives, words and intimate experiences of individuals variously involved in and affected by these conflicts. At the same time, it aims to use this particular case study to illustrate how the dynamics in northern Kenya may provide comparative insights to well-known, compelling contexts of violence around the globe.Less

Jon D. Holtzman

Published in print: 2016-11-01

One of the most disturbing spectacles of recent decades has been brutal acts of violence—indeed genocide—between groups who had long lived together in relative peace. In such cases lethal violence is the product not of some far away and unseen hand but rather the hand of your neighbor, someone who before some unforeseen event was perhaps even your friend. Employing multi-sited and multi-vocal ethnography, the book examines how peaceful neighbors become transformed into perpetrators and victims of lethal violence. It engages with a set of interlocking Kenyan case studies, focusing on sometimes-peaceful, sometimes violent interactions between Samburu herders and neighboring groups, interweaving Samburu narratives of key violent events with the narratives of neighboring groups on the other side of the same encounters. The book is, on one hand, an ethnography of particular people in a particular place, vividly portraying the complex and confusing dynamics of interethnic violence principally through the lives, words and intimate experiences of individuals variously involved in and affected by these conflicts. At the same time, it aims to use this particular case study to illustrate how the dynamics in northern Kenya may provide comparative insights to well-known, compelling contexts of violence around the globe.

Explorers and ethnographers in Africa during the period of colonial expansion are usually assumed to have been guided by rational aims such as the desire for scientific knowledge, fame, or financial ...
More

Explorers and ethnographers in Africa during the period of colonial expansion are usually assumed to have been guided by rational aims such as the desire for scientific knowledge, fame, or financial gain. This book, the culmination of many years of research on nineteenth-century exploration in Central Africa, provides a new view of those early European explorers and their encounters with Africans. It shows that explorers were far from rational—often meeting their hosts in extraordinary states influenced by opiates, alcohol, sex, fever, fatigue, and violence. The book presents little-known source material, and points to its implications for our understanding of the beginnings of modern colonization. At the same time, it makes a contribution to current debates about the intellectual origins and nature of anthropological inquiry. Drawing on travel accounts—most of them Belgian and German—published between 1878 and the start of World War I, the book describes encounters between European travelers and the Africans they met. It argues that the loss of control experienced by these early travelers actually served to enhance cross-cultural understanding, allowing the foreigners to make sense of strange facts and customs.Less

Out of Our Minds : Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa

Johannes Fabian

Published in print: 2000-06-13

Explorers and ethnographers in Africa during the period of colonial expansion are usually assumed to have been guided by rational aims such as the desire for scientific knowledge, fame, or financial gain. This book, the culmination of many years of research on nineteenth-century exploration in Central Africa, provides a new view of those early European explorers and their encounters with Africans. It shows that explorers were far from rational—often meeting their hosts in extraordinary states influenced by opiates, alcohol, sex, fever, fatigue, and violence. The book presents little-known source material, and points to its implications for our understanding of the beginnings of modern colonization. At the same time, it makes a contribution to current debates about the intellectual origins and nature of anthropological inquiry. Drawing on travel accounts—most of them Belgian and German—published between 1878 and the start of World War I, the book describes encounters between European travelers and the Africans they met. It argues that the loss of control experienced by these early travelers actually served to enhance cross-cultural understanding, allowing the foreigners to make sense of strange facts and customs.

This finely drawn portrait of a complex, polycultural urban community in Madagascar emphasizes the role of spirit medium healers, a group heretofore seen as having little power, and whom, the book ...
More

This finely drawn portrait of a complex, polycultural urban community in Madagascar emphasizes the role of spirit medium healers, a group heretofore seen as having little power, and whom, the book argues, are far from powerless among the peasants and migrant laborers who work the land in this plantation economy. In fact, the book's wide-ranging analysis shows that tromba, or spirit possession, is central to understanding the complex identities of insiders and outsiders in this community, which draws people from all over the island and abroad. This study also reveals the contradictions between indigenous healing and Western-derived Protestant healing and psychiatry. Particular attention to the significance of migrant women's and children's experiences in a context of seeking relief from personal and social ills gives the book's investigation importance for gender studies, as well as for studies in medical anthropology, Africa and Madagascar, the politics of culture, and religion and ritual.Less

The Possessed and the Dispossessed : Spirits, Identity, and Power in a Madagascar Migrant Town

Lesley Sharp

Published in print: 1994-01-06

This finely drawn portrait of a complex, polycultural urban community in Madagascar emphasizes the role of spirit medium healers, a group heretofore seen as having little power, and whom, the book argues, are far from powerless among the peasants and migrant laborers who work the land in this plantation economy. In fact, the book's wide-ranging analysis shows that tromba, or spirit possession, is central to understanding the complex identities of insiders and outsiders in this community, which draws people from all over the island and abroad. This study also reveals the contradictions between indigenous healing and Western-derived Protestant healing and psychiatry. Particular attention to the significance of migrant women's and children's experiences in a context of seeking relief from personal and social ills gives the book's investigation importance for gender studies, as well as for studies in medical anthropology, Africa and Madagascar, the politics of culture, and religion and ritual.

Youth and identity politics figure prominently in this study of personal and collective memory in Madagascar. A deeply nuanced ethnography of historical consciousness, it challenges many ...
More

Youth and identity politics figure prominently in this study of personal and collective memory in Madagascar. A deeply nuanced ethnography of historical consciousness, it challenges many cross-cultural investigations of youth, for its key actors are not adults but schoolchildren. This book refutes dominant assumptions that African children are the helpless victims of postcolonial crises, incapable of organized, sustained collective thought or action. It insists instead on the political agency of Malagasy youth who, as they decipher their current predicament, offer potent, historicized critiques of colonial violence, nationalist resistance, foreign mass media, and schoolyard survival. The book asserts that autobiography and national history are inextricably linked and therefore must be read in tandem, a process that exposes how political consciousness is forged in the classroom, within the home, and on the street in Madagascar.Less

The Sacrificed Generation : Youth, History, and the Colonized Mind in Madagascar

Lesley Sharp

Published in print: 2002-09-03

Youth and identity politics figure prominently in this study of personal and collective memory in Madagascar. A deeply nuanced ethnography of historical consciousness, it challenges many cross-cultural investigations of youth, for its key actors are not adults but schoolchildren. This book refutes dominant assumptions that African children are the helpless victims of postcolonial crises, incapable of organized, sustained collective thought or action. It insists instead on the political agency of Malagasy youth who, as they decipher their current predicament, offer potent, historicized critiques of colonial violence, nationalist resistance, foreign mass media, and schoolyard survival. The book asserts that autobiography and national history are inextricably linked and therefore must be read in tandem, a process that exposes how political consciousness is forged in the classroom, within the home, and on the street in Madagascar.